12/15/2025
Project update from Spoken Jazz and The Tingg Machine
Have you ever received a gift from your former self? This book and the project surrounding it is the product of such a gift. In late 2023, an intern working at my studio (Kukuau Studio in downtown Hilo) was organizing the old walk-in freezer (left over from when the building was a bakery and is now used for storage and sound isolation for recording) when she came across a sealed manila envelope addressed to myself and post-dated 2003. Knowing what it was, I was in shock, having forgotten that I’d even done that, let alone moved to Hawaii with the envelope poorly filed in a stack of old notebooks and newspaper clippings. Inside were three self-published books produced while in college at a time when I was living in a Volkswagen bus in the early 2000s. They looked as if they had just come from Kinko’s after not seeing the light of day for twenty years. I was particularly excited because I thought the third book was lost forever after being coerced to throw the original manuscripts into the dumpster fifteen years prior by my then-wife.
I had just finished writing an episodic audio musical called “Cam Girl” and decided to go straight into writing the story surrounding the creation of these books in a similar format. The scope of the project grew clearer as the 380-page script developed, and it occurred to me that there would be three parts to it: the episodic audio musical, my first jazz record, and the rerelease of a compilation of the three zines into one, professionally published book. When discussing the project with my friend and mentor, Patrick Snow, he brilliantly advised me to get the book published first and let that help raise the capital to produce the musical and the Jazz record. So, I went to work digitizing the content and found a publisher in a subsidiary of Ingram Publishing called Newman Springs, to whom I’m extremely grateful, as this is not the type of book they publish every day.
The process rekindled memories cloaked by a dreamy cloud as it seemed I was stealing them from a person who no longer exists. Sure, on paper, he does, but fortunately, twenty years of growth have happened between now and then. I could’ve gone through and edited the content to make it less vulgar and more palatable, but decided to keep it in its raw form to convey the most authentic experience for the reader. Much of the inspiration originally came from a place of resistance against a culture of political correctness that began to show its ugly face in the late 90s and has since grown to levels that were actually predicted in the text. Unlike most people, I felt compelled to hash these ideas out on paper to inspire a conversation and bring light to alternative ways of thinking about the world, western culture, and where a hyper-creative in his early twenties fits into it. My biggest hope is for it to still have that effect over two decades later, despite the now vintage references to archaic technology and world events. With that, I thank you for taking the time to read or listen to this book and helping the overall project come to fruition.
To preorder your personalized copy of Spoken Jazz & the tingg* Machine mailed to your door, follow the link and make a donation of $20+ here---> http://spot.fund/1q76n2sc
In Joy & Music, Bub Pratt
